


Little Green Alien

by Noore



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-28
Updated: 2018-09-29
Packaged: 2019-07-18 15:12:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,843
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16121129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Noore/pseuds/Noore
Summary: Being in university is kind of like being in outer space, falling for someone is something like falling into a black hole.





	1. Sun

“Lance.”

“My life is in shambles.”

“Lance.”

“Woe is me.”

“Lance, get out of my room.”

There he was, Lance McClain, ladies’ man. Sprawled out face first on her bunk in his satin pajamas with his bare feet slapping against the mattress like a petulant child. Sadly enough this was actually one of his finer moments, in Pidge’s opinion. She glances over at him from her seat on the floor with a pitying expression. It’s not like he kicked her off the bed, she actually liked sitting on the floor. _Like a gremlin_ , he often teased. She didn’t know why, it was just comfortable. The room was filled with the sounds of his whining and the fast paced, rhythmic tapping of her fingers flying across the keyboard in her lap. A typical weekend for the two of them. Sometimes Lance could be a nuisance upon her alone time, but he was entertaining, some background noise at the very least. It gets boring in her room at night, which made his presence all the more welcome.

They had a routine. He’ll bring her coffee or a peanut butter sandwich, try to clean up the absolute trash fire that was her room but she won't let him, she already knows where everything is and she doesn’t like people touching her stuff, which he _also_ loved to do. He’ll steal her headphones, she’ll retaliate by stealing his jacket. And through it all they’d sit there, musing about the day’s events or just going about their business quietly, or as quiet as could be with Lance around. It was their thing.

He springs to his feet, still on the bed, and throws her blanket around his shoulders like a cape.

“I will not lose to that swoopy haired pretty boy!” He proclaims to the ceiling.

“Lose at what, exactly?” She asks.

He falters with a blush before regaining his confidence and resuming his shouting, “You don’t understand, Allura’s been spending way too much time with this ‘Lotor’ punk!”

“You sound like a concerned father whose daughter is fooling around with some boy on the football team. They’re both in student government, of course they’re gonna spend a lot of time together, what’s the big deal?” She asks, knowing Lance hasn’t fully come to terms with his crush on Allura since, unlike every other girl, they were actually friends.

“A lot of time together...” Realization dawns upon his face exaggeratedly as he sinks into her green comforter. Pidge simply shrugs with a sigh before turning away from him and resuming her programming homework.

A few minutes later he perks up again. Typical Lance.

“Do you think _I_ should grow my hair out?” He asks her, fiddling with the short tufts of his bangs.

The thought of Lance whipping his hair over his shoulder dramatically crosses her mind and she giggles.

“No. Absolutely not. Forbidden.”

“Why are you laughing? I’d look good!” He flips over onto his back, tossing one of Pidge’s stuffed animals towards the ceiling to amuse himself before pausing to add, “Speaking of, why don’t you let your hair grow out the way it was before? I’ve seen the picture of you and Matt from back in middle school, you looked cute.”

The end of the wall of text on her laptop’s screen reads “<script_type=”iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii” as her fingers stop dead in their tracks. She can feel the hair on the back of her neck rise as the compliment travels from her back up to her ears and she quickly composes herself before he can notice her embarrassment, erasing her error and continuing the line of code.

“No thanks, too much of a hassle.” She says, and really it is, but the larger reason is that if she goes back to the way she used to look she’s afraid she won’t be the person she is right now, that people won’t look at her the same, that she’ll be too much of a _girl_. It sounds ridiculous, and she doesn’t think anyone will understand, so she keeps quiet about it. It’s not the only thing she’s keeping quiet about.

“Aww, come on. I’d help you, I’m pretty good at braiding. I would braid my niece’s hair all the time back home,” he says with a mix of fondness and sadness. Really she feels sorry for him, from what she knows about Lance, he’s very family oriented so being at university all the way in America so far away from them must hurt. Her brother and father have frequently gone away on lengthy business trips, but the time apart never been anything so substantial. She really is lucky. She wishes she could share some of that luck with him.

“... Maybe. But I’ve got a tender head so you better be as good as you say.” And that’s all he’s getting.

“Miss Holt, you have nothing to fear! Your scalp will be in heaven once I’m done with it,” he demonstrates this by climbing off the side of her bed and beginning to massage her head.

She wants to get annoyed and slap him off of her, but he’s not wrong, it actually feels pretty good. However, she can feel her ears turning red with heat so she slaps him. He laughs. The sound rings pleasantly in her ears.

Another thing she can’t tell anybody, she thinks he’s pretty cute. Yes, he was annoying, arrogant, flirty. But he was also compassionate and sensitive, confident and funny. But she could never admit that, she wasn’t allowed to. They were too different. She believed in numbers and statistics and Lance was the type of person who’d crash into a traffic pole because he was either staring at the sunset or a pretty girl, they weren’t compatible. Their relationship was fine the way it was and there was no point in complicating things. Besides, how could she let herself have a crush on someone that flirted with half the school’s population, including a couple of guys? It was way too much of a hassle.

Honestly, imagine if she had a crush on him? God. Imagine. Imagine having him fawn and get all googly eyed over everything that moved, right in front of her. Imagine him treating her like one of the guys, getting in her personal space, flustering her, all just to come in her room and rant and rave about his giant crush on Allura at two in the morning. Imagine.

She takes her glasses off and places her forehead in her hand. She’s an idiot.

Pidge chances a look at him, sitting on _her_ bed in _her_ headphones and _her_ blanket without a care in the world like she was his plucky roommate rather than a girl whose room he was in with the door closed after dark. Her father would kill them both if he knew anything about this. Hell, her brother would too if he wasn’t off lecturing at another university a few states away right now.

She keeps staring at him until he notices her and turns his music down.

“What’s up, Pidgeon?”

“Nothing,” she says as she stands up, bringing her laptop with her and discarding her glasses on her night stand. She flops down on the bed next to him, well into his personal space as she lets her back touch the wall, continuing to type nonchalantly. She suppresses a smirk as she can literally feel the awkwardness begin to raidate off of him.

“What?” She asks.

Lance toys a little with the headphones in his hand before letting out a small ‘nothing’ and playing on his phone, the sudden realization that he’s sitting on a girl’s bed with her alone seeming to finally blossom in that big head of his. He scoots over, away from her, and she takes it as a challenge and decides to up the ante.

Still typing away on her laptop, she folds herself over to lay on her pillow, unfolding her legs and placing them on top of his.  
He laughs awkwardly, not seeming to know what to do with his hands. She was loving this.

“Sooo,” he begins, but doesn’t finish his thought.

“ _What?_ ” she reiterates, raising her eyebrows to give him a sarcastic look.

“Nothing,” he says, settling on placing his palms flat on the mattress on either side of himself, the wall must be a lot more interesting than his phone all of a sudden because that’s what he’s staring at. She loves that she’s finally gotten him to squirm.

After a moment, she sighs and lets her back sinker deeper into the pillows behind her, satisfied.

“Lance?”

“Yeah?”

“Get out.”


	2. Mars

The next day does not start off well.

Pidge sleeps through her alarm and after getting off her bus has to trade her dignity and self respect in favor of running across the campus in her baggy flannel and dirty old vans, hair a mess and backpack falling off. She knows she’s going to ace the exam today with no problem but that’s never the issue, the real issue is getting to class in the first place. Back home, she wanted to take online classes but her mother threatened to kick her out of the house if she gave in to a life of hermitry after the accomplishments of her brother and father gave weight and expectation to the name Holt.

She opens the door to her aeronautical engineering class out of breath with her heart pounding, spotting Hunk in the back row waving a hand over to her, removing his laptop bag from the seat beside him so she can sit down. They fist bump and she takes a load off as the class waits for the professor to get his affairs in order before their exam begins.

“You’re a mess,” Hunk whispers with a smile, secretly going over his review notes under the desk. “If you want to do any last minute studying, now’s the time, the old man doesn’t seem to be having the best morning either,” he adds and she glances over at their elderly professor at the front of the room, nodding off into his portable coffee cup as he checks the clock before hobbling over to lock the door to their classroom. Looks like she made it just in time.

“I’ve got it all up here,” she gestures to her head with a cocky smirk. Hunk shakes his head and calls her a brain before stuffing his notebook in his bag as the professor announces he’s ready to begin.

 

The exam passes without incident, each answer coming to her as if every question were the most obvious thing in the world. Her love for aeronautics and computer engineering make these kinds of things more of a technicality than anything, her real goal is to make a name for herself in the world of science and engineering, spearhead the world’s journey into space and better understanding of what new technology has to offer just like Matt and her father. She wants to make something positive out of the unintentional heaviness they’ve left on her young shoulders, and this degree is just one step toward lifting it high above her head.

She muses on all of this as she sips her soda on a bench near the science building, tired students exiting its double doors every few minutes. Hunk giggles at his phone beside her.

“Look what Lance sent me,” he says, showing her a video of a cat in a shirt falling off a bed. She smiles but she’s annoyed to hear his name so early in the day. Honestly it was Hunk’s fault she’d even met the guy a couple months ago; lanky arms hanging off his shoulder as she came to meet up with him after his mechanical engineering class, doing a double take as he marveled at how short she was. He’d been annoying her ever since.

She never felt she had the time to play around with friends, even in elementary school, the other kids never particularly interested her, and when she tried to talk with them they’d laugh at her and call her a nerd. So yeah, friends were off the table for a while until she met Hunk in her high school’s English class and he said he liked her Star Wars backpack. They’d been best buds ever since, and she was so happy when they got into the same University all the way out here in Texas. A big blessing considering she was even more out of touch here than her own hometown, where she was already considered an outcast.

“He’s pretty upset about the whole Allura thing,” she says absentmindedly, not knowing what else to talk about after they’d exhausted their recap of the day’s events.

“Oh, her thing with that foreign pretty boy?” He replies, gossipy as ever, “Yeah, Lance is screwed. Like, I totally saw them about to kiss outside of the Arts building the other day, it was wild.”

“Oh.” She feels a little bad for him now, and the sense of relief she feels deep down in her chest makes her feel ugly.

“Hey, it’s not like he has plenty of other people to choose from, there’s this guy with a mullet in his psych class he’s pretty keen on bothering,” Hunk sips his own drink and Pidge fumes a little.

“Oh.”

A moment passes and is broken abruptly.

“So what are you gonna do about this crush you have on him?”

Pidge chokes on her straw and nearly drops her cup on the ground as she stands up, her bag rustling and jingling loudly on her back.

“What?!”

“Oh, cut the crap, Pidge, the guy is in your room four nights a week. You don’t even invite _me_ over that much.”

“I do _not_ invite him over.” Her face was getting heated and she can feel her ears about to turn red but she feels like disproving Hunk will prove something to herself, so she continues, “He barges in, just like he barges into everything. Lance this, Lance that, I can’t stand him most of the time. All he does is goof off and steal my headphones, why would I invite him over? I don’t invite him over. And I don’t like him, either. Why would I? He’s dumb!”

Her rambling doesn’t faze him, as usual. “And yet here you are,” he says, gesturing his large hand towards her red face as if it proved his point.

“Shut _up_ , Hunk,” she says seriously before tossing her cup into the trash nearby, when he doesn’t say anything she gets fed up by the silence and decides she needs to go back to her dorm right now or she’ll turn into a pile of ashes right here by this rickety old bench.

“Whatever, I don’t care, forget it, I’ll see you tomorrow. Later, Hunk.” Pidge says in rapid succession before taking off toward the gates. Hunk shouts an apology and an offer to come back at her, but she’s already walking as fast as her short legs can carry her when she reaches the sidewalk. Her face is still warm and she places it in her cold hands to cool herself down, she feels bad for getting snappy with her best friend but she hates the suggestion that she and Lance were anything more than just friends when, like Hunk said, he has plenty of people to choose from. This entire situation makes her feel pathetic.

Once she gets back to the confines of her dorm room she’ll text Hunk an apology. And with that planned out and in order, she feels a little better as she makes her way across the street to the next avenue, pulling out her phone to see that Hunk already texted her ‘I’m sorry’ with a sad face. Aw, man. She isn’t even mad at _him_ really, and looking at it makes her feel guilty, so she pockets her phone and is about to turn the corner toward her bus when a car honks softly behind her.

* * *

 

If only she’d been paying attention she would have noticed him. She would have turned the other corner, she would have run away, or flipped him off, but she didn’t and now here he is rolling the passenger window down to poke his head out at her.

“Hey, Pidge, you’re looking tired, need a lift?” Lance asks with a smile as the doors unlock with a click.

“No,” she says quickly before turning back around to cross the street, but the light has already changed and the passing cars block her escape route.

“You mean to tell me you'd rather take the stinky bus at this hour than cruise home in my nice, clean, air conditioned car?” He asks, goading her.

“Yes.”

“Are you a scan tron? What’s with the one word answers, dude?” He sounds a little concerned and she hates the satisfaction it gives her, she doesn’t like being moody but she doesn’t want to see his face right now either, not after what happened last night and her argument with Hunk just a moment ago.

“It’s nothing, I’d just rather not get in a car with a guy I barely know.”

“Barely know? Pidge, I’m in your room like four nights a week. Did all those games of killbot phantasm mean _nothing_ to you?” He pouts like a kicked puppy and she cringes at his wording, she supposes there’s a good reason he and Hunk are such good friends. She’s so busy trying to get him to fuck off that she misses both the light and the bus taking off across the street and groans when she sees it speeding down the road in her peripheral vision.

“Oh. Oops. Sorry.” He says as his eyes follow the departing bus with hers.

“Great, thanks Lance.” The sarcasm drips from her gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry! Look, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, I just wanted to say hi, geez.” He sits back in his seat with a defeated huff, “Do you at least want to sit in the car while you wait for your bus? There’s no seats over there.”

The empathy is appreciated and he makes a good point, but she still scowls before looking around to see if anyone is watching (Lance was actually pretty popular and rumors tend to spread around campus during exam week) and wordlessly opening up the door, sitting in the passenger seat of his blue Toyota with her book bag in her lap. Lance beams at her as he sets the car in park across the street and lowers the radio.

“So, what’s up? How was the exam?”

“Easy.”

“Yeah, I figured,” he says, not commenting on her one word response.

He pulls out an oil pen and asks if she minds, she says no, and before it reaches his lips he considers it for a moment before offering it to her.

“You want to try some?” He has that mischievous smirk on his face and it makes her feel condescended to.

“Sure,” she says and really doesn’t know why, her brain is making bad decisions on autopilot and she knows her mom would kill her, but isn’t that what college is all about? She takes a short inhale and nothing happens.

“Is it out of battery?” She asks. He reaches over and holds down the button for her in bemusement. “Oh,” she follows his demonstration, inhaling it properly, and immediately starts coughing the second the smoke reaches her throat. He laughs at her.

“What—is in this? Gasoline?” she asks through a fit of coughs.

“It's _oil_ dude. Oh _man_. Oh Jesus, you don’t even know how to smoke a pen,” Lance takes it from her small hands and puts his lips to the tip of it, she tries to ignore that that’s where her own lips were just a moment ago. “Watch,” he takes a large inhale of smoke and holds it for a long time, the smoke pouring slowly from his nostrils as he catches it back in his mouth when he inhales again.

“See?” She does see and she’s furious for some reason. She takes the pen from him and holds her pull longer this time, coughing only a little as the smoke seems to overpower her lungs. How do people do this every day?

“We’ll turn you into a delinquent yet, Pidge,” Lance says as he takes the pen back from her after she hits it a couple more times, beginning to enjoy the dizzy feeling and heat it leaves her with; her eyes feel a little tight. Lance brings it to his lips for a quick pull one more time before looking at his rear view mirror and gesturing at the bus stop behind them.

“There comes your bus, dude.”

“Drive me home.” She demands, putting her seat belt on. His eyebrows shoot up before he turns back towards her and smiles.

"Why'd you change your mind? I know it's not cause of those baby puffs you took.” He winks, already putting the car in drive.

“Just drive, Lance.”

 

As they coast down the hazy Austin roadway she truly cant believe how she's sitting here right now after just berating Hunk for even implying she had anything but disdain in her heart for Lance, but she tries to ignore the thought as she stares at some kids walking home from campus outside the window.

After a while Lance pipes up from beside her, “So what's Pidge short for anyway? Is it some weird Italian name? Does it have an accent mark?” He asks.

Pidge wishes she could grab the wheel and swerve them into oncoming traffic rather than answer such a dumb question right now.

“It's not short for anything, it's a nickname my brother gave me when we were kids. My real name is Katie—Wait, you didn't know that? How did you not know that?” His denseness is unbelievable sometimes.

“I don't know, it never came up! and I didn't wanna be rude, okay?” He brings one hand up in frustration but keeps his eyes on the road. “Katie, huh? Katie Holt. Cute.”

She fights her body's natural response to get flustered but she can feel her heart speed up at the sound of her name. She tries to ignore the comment and simply says, “Yeah.“

“So should I call you Katie? Since you barely know me?”

“Oh shut up, and no, you can't.”

“That's so backwards!”

“Tough titties, eyes on the road.“

“Yeah, yeah,” he responds as he pulls up to the large apartment buildings owned by the school and rented out mostly to students on scholarship. Before she can step out of the car he stops her, grabbing her hand as she reaches in to pick up her book bag.

“Wait, Pidge,” he pleads and her heart seems to thump from inside her, the things Hunk was saying suddenly come to mind and she buries it under a flood of denial.

“What?”

“What's Katie short for?”

**Author's Note:**

> (If you're wondering why I'm posting this despite not finishing my Naoto fic, I still haven't given up on that, so just hold on a little longer. :))
> 
> I really like their dynamic and the potential their relationship has, as well as Pidge's character. I'd like to use this fic to explore that. I don't know how long it will be or where it will go, but I'm challenging myself to finish it by the end of October. I need to finish something for once, even if it's not the best, and I want to use this fic as my opportunity. I hope you enjoy. And let me know how you feel. :)


End file.
